|
Continued from previous page
"I get excited when I speak at high schools now,"
says Slay. "This drug situation allows me to tell children
that if you break the rules, you can lose your life,
certainly. But short of that, you can also lose your life-long
dream of being an Olympic champion. This
man worked for 19 years, and then he lost his dream
because he broke the rules."
Two other men from Wharton also competed in
the Sydney games, and while they didn't come away
with a medal, as Slay did, they says the experience was
extraordinary. Garrett Miller, W'99, was part of the
United States eight-man rowing boat, which came in
fifth in the finals. Cliff Bayer, a Wharton senior from
New York City, lost in the second round of the foil
fencing competition to the eventual gold-medal winner,
Kim Young Ho from South Korea.
"I'd be lying if I said I wasn't disappointed," says
Miller, who grew up in Erdenheim, Pa., a Philadelphia
suburb, and now lives in Princeton and works
for Mount Lucas Management, a managed futures
hedge fund. "I was expecting us to win and it can be
pretty disappointing when it doesn't work out. I guess
we just all hit a slump at the worst time."
Miller and the rest of the rowers on the team
trained in Princeton with Olympic coach Mike Teti.
Most of them had taken part-time jobs in the area so
they could do several training sessions a day. At 23,
Miller was one of the youngest on the team in a sport
where primetime is in a competitor's mid-to-late 20s.
"Currently, I say I'm retired, but that could be an
emotional decision," he says. "At 23, I still could go
on. I just need a little time to sort things out."
Teti chose the Olympic eight team through a
series of trials and physiological testing. Miller, who
usually rowed in the middle seats – the strength positions
– during his career at Penn, rowed in the
seventh seat, the prime position for keeping the
rhythm of the rowing for the rest of the boat, during
the Olympics.
In reaching the finals, the Olympic eight won its
second preliminary heat by a mere two-tenths of a second.
But during the final race, the boat got off to a
bad start, and after 500 meters of the 1,500-meter
race was effectively out of it, finishing at least three
seconds behind the medal-winning boats.
"Something just didn't click," says Miller. "It's hard
to pinpoint it, but the whole week, we just weren't on.
In an Olympic year, everyone turns it up a notch, so
it was a inopportune time."
Because the preliminary race was so close, Miller
and his boat mates got more TV face time than the
usual rowers.
"I think they replayed it a million times because
it was so close," he says. "But I wish they were able to
get us on the air with a gold-medal win."
|
